Arabesque
Encyclopedia
The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements. Within the very wide range of Eurasia
n decorative art that includes motifs matching this basic definition the term "arabesque" is used consistently as a technical term by art historians to describe only elements of the decoration found in two phases: Islamic art
from about the 9th century onwards, and European decorative art from the Renaissance
onwards. Arabesques are a fundamental element of Islamic art but they develop what was already a long tradition by the coming of Islam. The past and current usage of the term in respect of European art can only be described as confused and inconsistent. Some Western arabesques derive from Islamic art, but others are closely based on Ancient Roman decorations. In the West they are essentially found in the decorative arts, but because of the generally non-figurative nature of Islamic art arabesque decoration is there often a very prominent element in the most significant works, and plays a large part in the decoration of architecture.
types of scrolling vegetal decoration that were inherited by Islam, and used with relatively little change in early Islamic art, for example in the famous 8th century mosaic
s of the Great Mosque of Damascus
. The plants most often used are stylized versions of the acanthus, with its emphasis on leafy forms, and the vine, with an equal emphasis on twining stems. The evolution of these forms into a distinctive Islamic type was complete by the 11th century, having begun in the 8th or 9th century in works like the Mshatta Facade
. Thereafter it was used very widely across the Islamic world, by no means just in Arabic-speaking areas, in many media for several centuries, and developed further. In the process of development the plant forms became increasing simplified and stylized. Though the broad outline of the process is generally agreed, there is a considerable diversity of views held by specialist scholars on detailed issues concerning the development, categorization and meaning of the arabesque. The detailed study of Islamic arabesque forms was begun by Alois Riegl
in his formalist
study Stilfragen
: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) of 1893, who in the process developed his influential concept of the Kunstwollen. Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical world to the Islamic arabesque; while the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic analysis of the development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of examples known today. Jessica Rawson
has recently extended the analysis to cover Chinese art
, which Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese decoration back to the same tradition; the shared background helping to make the assimilation of Chinese motifs into Persian art after the Mongol invasion harmonious and productive.
Claims are often made regarding the theological significance of the arabesque, and its origin in a specifically Islamic view of the world; however these are without support from written historical sources as, like most medieval cultures, the Islamic world has not left us documentation of their intentions in using the decorative motifs they did. At the popular level such theories often appear uninformed as to the wider context of the arabesque. In similar fashion, proposed connections between the arabesque and Arabic knowledge of geometry
remains a subject of debate; not all art historians are persuaded that such knowledge had reached, or was needed by, those creating arabesque designs, although in certain cases there is evidence that such a connection did exist. The case for a connection with Islamic mathematics
is much stronger for the development of the geometric patterns
with which arabesques are often combined in art. Geometric decoration often uses patterns that are made up of straight lines and regular angles but are clearly derived as a whole from curvilinear arabesque patterns; the extent to which these too are described as arabesque varies between different writers.
Many arabesque patterns disappear at (or "under" as it often appears to a viewer) a framing edge without ending, and thus can be regarded as infinitely extendable outside the space they actually occupy; this was certainly a distinctive feature of the Islamic form, though not without precedent. Most but not all foliage decoration in the preceding cultures terminated at the edge of the occupied space, although infinitely repeatable patterns in foliage are very common in the modern world in wallpaper
and textile
s.
Typically, in earlier forms there is no attempt at realism; no particular species of plant is being imitated, and the forms are often botanically impossible or implausible. "Leaf" forms typically spring sideways from the stem, in what is often called a "half-palmette
" form, named after its distant and very different looking ancestor in Ancient Egyptian and Greek ornament. New stems spring from leaf-tips, a type often called honeysuckle
, and the stems often have no tips, winding endlessly out of the space. The early Mshatta Facade
is recognisably some sort of vine, with conventional leaves on the end of short stalks and bunches of grapes or berries, but later forms usually lack these. Flowers are rare until about 1500, after which they appear more often, especially in Ottoman art, and are often identifiable by species. In Ottoman art the large and feathery leaves called saz became very popular, and were elaborated in drawings showing just one or more large leaves. Eventually floral decoration mostly derived from Chinese styles, especially those of Chinese porcelain
, replaces the arabesque in many types of work, such as pottery, textiles and miniatures.
ic view of the world. To Muslim
s, these forms, taken together, constitute an infinite pattern that extends beyond the visible material world. To many in the Islamic world, they concretely symbolize the infinite, and therefore uncentralized, nature of the creation of the one God (Allah
). Furthermore, the Islamic Arabesque artist conveys a spirituality without the icon
ography of Christian art
.
Mistakes in repetitions may be intentionally introduced as a show of humility by artists who believe only Allah can produce perfection, although this theory is disputed.
Arabesque art consists of a series of repeating geometric forms which are occasionally accompanied by calligraphy
. Ettinghausen et al. describe the arabesque as a "vegetal design consisting of full...and half palmette
s [as] an unending continuous pattern...in which each leaf grows out of the tip of another." To the adherents of Islam
, the Arabesque are symbolic of their united faith and the way in which traditional Islamic cultures view the world.
There are two modes to arabesque art. The first recalls the principles that govern the order of the world. These principles include the bare basics of what makes objects structurally sound and, by extension, beautiful (i.e. the angle and the fixed/static shapes that it creates—esp. the truss
). In the first mode, each repeating geometric form has a built-in symbolism ascribed to it. For example, the square, with its four equilateral
sides, is symbolic of the equally important elements of nature: earth
, air, fire
and water
. Without any one of the four, the physical world, represented by a circle that inscribes the square, would collapse upon itself and cease to exist. The second mode is based upon the flowing nature of plant
forms. This mode recalls the feminine
nature of life giving. In addition, upon inspection of the many examples of Arabesque art, some would argue that there is in fact a third mode, the mode of Arabic calligraphy.
Instead of recalling something related to the 'True Reality' (the reality of the spiritual world), for the Muslim calligraphy
is a visible expression of the highest art of all; the art of the spoken word (the transmittal of thoughts and of history). In Islam, the most important document to be transmitted orally is, of course, the Qur'an
. Proverb
s and complete passages from the Qur'an can be seen today in Arabesque art. The coming together of these three forms creates the Arabesque, and this is a reflection of unity arising from diversity (a basic tenet of Islam).
The arabesque can also be equally thought of as both art
and science
, some say. The artwork is at the same time mathematically precise, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolic. So due to this duality of creation, they say, the artistic part of this equation can be further subdivided into both secular and religious artwork. However, for many Muslims there is no distinction; all forms of art, the natural world, mathematics and science are all creations of God and therefore are reflections of the same thing - that is, God's will expressed through His Creation. In other words, man can discover the geometric forms that constitute the Arabesque, but these forms always existed before as part of God's creation, as shown in this picture.
There is great similarity between arabesque artwork from very different geographic regions. In fact, the similarities are so pronounced, that it is sometimes difficult for experts to tell where a given style of arabesque comes from. The reason for this is that the science and mathematics that are used to construct Arabesque artwork are universal. Therefore, for most Muslims, the best artwork that can be created by man for use in the Mosque
is artwork that displays the underlying order and unity of nature. The order and unity of the material world, they believe, is a mere ghost
ly approximation of the spirit
ual world, which for many Muslims is the place where the only true reality exists. Discovered geometric forms, therefore, exemplify this perfect reality because God's creation has been obscured by the sin
s of man.
The term was first used in the West in Italian
, where rabeschi was used in the 16th century as a term for "pilaster
ornaments featuring acanthus
decoration, specifically "running scrolls" that ran vertically up a panel or pilaster, rather than horizontally along a frieze
. From there it spread to England, where Henry VIII owned, in an inventory of 1549, an agate
cup with a "fote and Couer of siluer and guilt enbossed with Rebeske worke", and William Herne or Heron, Serjeant Painter
from 1572 to 1580, was paid for painting Elizabeth I's barge with "rebeske work". Unfortunately the styles so described can only be guessed at, although the design by Hans Holbein
for a covered cup for Jane Seymour
in 1536 (see gallery) already has zones in both Islamic-derived arabesque/moresque style (see below) and classically-derived acanthus volutes.
Another related term is moresque
, meaning "Moorish
"; Randle Cotgrave
's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611 defines this as: "a rude or anticke painting, or carving, wherin the feet and tayles of beasts, &c, are intermingled with, or made to resemble, a kind of wild leaves, &c." and "arabesque", in its earliest use cited in the OED (but as a French word), as "Rebeske work; a small and curious flourishing". In France "arabesque" first appears in 1546, and "was first applied in the latter part of the 17th century" to grotesque
ornament, "despite the classical origin of the latter", especially if without human figures in it - a distinction still often made, but not consistently observed,
Over the following centuries the three terms grotesque, moresque and arabesque were used largely interchangeably in English, French and German for styles of decoration derived at least as much from the European past as the Islamic world, with "grotesque" gradually acquiring its main modern meaning, related more to Gothic gargoyle
s and caricature
than to either Pompeii
-style Roman painting or Islamic patterns. Meanwhile the word "arabesque" was now being applied to Islamic art itself, by 1851 at the latest, when John Ruskin
uses it in The Stones of Venice
. Writers over the last decades have attempted to salvage meaningful distinctions between the words from the confused wreckage of historical sources.
Peter Furhring, a specialist in the history of ornament, says that (also in a French context):
Fuhring notes that grotesques were "confusingly called arabesques in eighteenth century France", but in his terminology "the major types of ornament that apear in French sixteenth century etchings and engraving ...can be divided into two groups. The first includes ornaments adopted from antiquity: grotesques, architectural ornaments such as the orders, foliage scrolls and self-contained elements such as trophies, terms and vases. A second group, far smaller than the first, comprises modern ornaments: moresques, interlaced bands, strapwork, and elements such as cartouches...", categories he goes on to discuss individually.
The moresque or arabesque style was especially popular and long-lived in the Western arts of the book: bookbinding
s decorated in gold tooling, borders for illustrations, and printer's ornaments for decorating empty spaces on the page. In this field the technique of gold tooling had also arrived in the 15th century from the Islamic world, and indeed much of the leather itself was imported from there. Small motifs in this style have continued to be used by conservative book designers up to the present day.
According to Harold Osborne, in France, the "characteristic development of the French arabesque combined bandwork deriving from the moresque with decorative acanthus foliage radiating from C-scrolls connected by short bars". Apparently starting in embroidery
, it then appears in garden design before being used in Northern Mannerist painted decorative schemes "with a central medallion combined with acanthus and other forms" by Simon Vouet
and then Charles Lebrun who used "scrolls of flat bandwork joined by horizontal bars and contrasting with ancanthus scrolls and palmette
." More exuberant arabesque designs by Jean Bérain the Elder
are an early "intimation" of the Rococo
, which was to take the arabesque into three dimensions in reliefs.
The use of "arabesque" as an English noun first appears, in relation to painting, in William Beckford
's novel Vathek
in 1786.
Arabesque is also used as a term for complex freehand pen flourishes in drawing or other graphic media. The Grove Dictionary of Art
will have none of this confusion, and says flatly: "Over the centuries the word has been applied to a wide variety of winding and twining vegetal decoration in art and meandering themes in music, but it properly applies only to Islamic art", so contradicting the definition of 1888 still found in the Oxford English Dictionary
: "A species of mural or surface decoration in colour or low relief, composed in flowing lines of branches, leaves, and scroll-work fancifully intertwined. Also fig[uratively]. As used in Moorish and Arabic decorative art (from which, almost exclusively, it was known in the Middle Ages), representations of living creatures were excluded; but in the arabesques of Raphael, founded on the ancient Græco-Roman work of this kind, and in those of Renaissance decoration, human and animal figures, both natural and grotesque, as well as vases, armour, and objects of art, are freely introduced; to this the term is now usually applied, the other being distinguished as Moorish Arabesque, or Moresque."
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
n decorative art that includes motifs matching this basic definition the term "arabesque" is used consistently as a technical term by art historians to describe only elements of the decoration found in two phases: Islamic art
Islamic art
Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...
from about the 9th century onwards, and European decorative art from the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
onwards. Arabesques are a fundamental element of Islamic art but they develop what was already a long tradition by the coming of Islam. The past and current usage of the term in respect of European art can only be described as confused and inconsistent. Some Western arabesques derive from Islamic art, but others are closely based on Ancient Roman decorations. In the West they are essentially found in the decorative arts, but because of the generally non-figurative nature of Islamic art arabesque decoration is there often a very prominent element in the most significant works, and plays a large part in the decoration of architecture.
Islamic arabesque
The Islamic arabesque is a development of the Late Antique and ByzantineByzantine
Byzantine usually refers to the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages.Byzantine may also refer to:* A citizen of the Byzantine Empire, or native Greek during the Middle Ages...
types of scrolling vegetal decoration that were inherited by Islam, and used with relatively little change in early Islamic art, for example in the famous 8th century mosaic
Mosaic
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...
s of the Great Mosque of Damascus
Umayyad Mosque
The Umayyad Mosque, also known as the Great Mosque of Damascus or formerly the Basilica of Saint John the Baptist , is located in the old city of Damascus, is one of the largest and oldest mosques in the world...
. The plants most often used are stylized versions of the acanthus, with its emphasis on leafy forms, and the vine, with an equal emphasis on twining stems. The evolution of these forms into a distinctive Islamic type was complete by the 11th century, having begun in the 8th or 9th century in works like the Mshatta Facade
Mshatta facade
The Mshatta Facade is the decorated part of the facade of the 8th century Umayyad residential palace of Qasr Mshatta, one of the Desert Castles in Jordan, which is currently installed in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany...
. Thereafter it was used very widely across the Islamic world, by no means just in Arabic-speaking areas, in many media for several centuries, and developed further. In the process of development the plant forms became increasing simplified and stylized. Though the broad outline of the process is generally agreed, there is a considerable diversity of views held by specialist scholars on detailed issues concerning the development, categorization and meaning of the arabesque. The detailed study of Islamic arabesque forms was begun by Alois Riegl
Alois Riegl
Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History...
in his formalist
Formalism (art)
In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...
study Stilfragen
Stilfragen
Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik is a book on the history of ornament by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. It was published in Berlin in 1893. The English translation renders the title as Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament, although this has...
: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) of 1893, who in the process developed his influential concept of the Kunstwollen. Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical world to the Islamic arabesque; while the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic analysis of the development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of examples known today. Jessica Rawson
Jessica Rawson
Jessica Rawson, DBE, FBA is an English art historian, curator and academic administrator, specializing in Chinese art. After many years at the British Museum, she was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, from 1994 until her retirement in 2010...
has recently extended the analysis to cover Chinese art
Chinese art
Chinese art is visual art that, whether ancient or modern, originated in or is practiced in China or by Chinese artists or performers. Early so-called "stone age art" dates back to 10,000 BC, mostly consisting of simple pottery and sculptures. This early period was followed by a series of art...
, which Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese decoration back to the same tradition; the shared background helping to make the assimilation of Chinese motifs into Persian art after the Mongol invasion harmonious and productive.
Claims are often made regarding the theological significance of the arabesque, and its origin in a specifically Islamic view of the world; however these are without support from written historical sources as, like most medieval cultures, the Islamic world has not left us documentation of their intentions in using the decorative motifs they did. At the popular level such theories often appear uninformed as to the wider context of the arabesque. In similar fashion, proposed connections between the arabesque and Arabic knowledge of geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
remains a subject of debate; not all art historians are persuaded that such knowledge had reached, or was needed by, those creating arabesque designs, although in certain cases there is evidence that such a connection did exist. The case for a connection with Islamic mathematics
Islamic mathematics
In the history of mathematics, mathematics in medieval Islam, often termed Islamic mathematics or Arabic mathematics, covers the body of mathematics preserved and developed under the Islamic civilization between circa 622 and 1600...
is much stronger for the development of the geometric patterns
Islamic geometric patterns
Islamic decoration makes great use of geometric patterns which have developed over the centuries. Many of these derived from various earlier cultures: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Central Asian, and Persian. They are usually distinguished from the arabesque, the term for decoration in Islamic art...
with which arabesques are often combined in art. Geometric decoration often uses patterns that are made up of straight lines and regular angles but are clearly derived as a whole from curvilinear arabesque patterns; the extent to which these too are described as arabesque varies between different writers.
Many arabesque patterns disappear at (or "under" as it often appears to a viewer) a framing edge without ending, and thus can be regarded as infinitely extendable outside the space they actually occupy; this was certainly a distinctive feature of the Islamic form, though not without precedent. Most but not all foliage decoration in the preceding cultures terminated at the edge of the occupied space, although infinitely repeatable patterns in foliage are very common in the modern world in wallpaper
Wallpaper
Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste...
and textile
Textile
A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...
s.
Typically, in earlier forms there is no attempt at realism; no particular species of plant is being imitated, and the forms are often botanically impossible or implausible. "Leaf" forms typically spring sideways from the stem, in what is often called a "half-palmette
Palmette
The palmette is a motif in decorative art which, in its most characteristic expression, resembles the fan-shaped leaves of a palm tree. It has an extremely long history, originating in Ancient Egypt with a subsequent development through the art of most of Eurasia, often in forms that bear...
" form, named after its distant and very different looking ancestor in Ancient Egyptian and Greek ornament. New stems spring from leaf-tips, a type often called honeysuckle
Honeysuckle
Honeysuckles are arching shrubs or twining vines in the family Caprifoliaceae, native to the Northern Hemisphere. There are about 180 species of honeysuckle, 100 of which occur in China; Europe, India and North America have only about 20 native species each...
, and the stems often have no tips, winding endlessly out of the space. The early Mshatta Facade
Mshatta facade
The Mshatta Facade is the decorated part of the facade of the 8th century Umayyad residential palace of Qasr Mshatta, one of the Desert Castles in Jordan, which is currently installed in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany...
is recognisably some sort of vine, with conventional leaves on the end of short stalks and bunches of grapes or berries, but later forms usually lack these. Flowers are rare until about 1500, after which they appear more often, especially in Ottoman art, and are often identifiable by species. In Ottoman art the large and feathery leaves called saz became very popular, and were elaborated in drawings showing just one or more large leaves. Eventually floral decoration mostly derived from Chinese styles, especially those of Chinese porcelain
Chinese porcelain
Chinese ceramic ware shows a continuous development since the pre-dynastic periods, and is one of the most significant forms of Chinese art. China is richly endowed with the raw materials needed for making ceramics. The first types of ceramics were made during the Palaeolithic era...
, replaces the arabesque in many types of work, such as pottery, textiles and miniatures.
Significance in Islam
The arabesques and geometric patterns of Islamic art are often said to arise from the IslamIslam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
ic view of the world. To Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
s, these forms, taken together, constitute an infinite pattern that extends beyond the visible material world. To many in the Islamic world, they concretely symbolize the infinite, and therefore uncentralized, nature of the creation of the one God (Allah
Allah
Allah is a word for God used in the context of Islam. In Arabic, the word means simply "God". It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá'ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and...
). Furthermore, the Islamic Arabesque artist conveys a spirituality without the icon
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
ography of Christian art
Christian art
Christian art is sacred art produced in an attempt to illustrate, supplement and portray in tangible form the principles of Christianity, though other definitions are possible. Most Christian groups use or have used art to some extent, although some have had strong objections to some forms of...
.
Mistakes in repetitions may be intentionally introduced as a show of humility by artists who believe only Allah can produce perfection, although this theory is disputed.
Arabesque art consists of a series of repeating geometric forms which are occasionally accompanied by calligraphy
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
. Ettinghausen et al. describe the arabesque as a "vegetal design consisting of full...and half palmette
Palmette
The palmette is a motif in decorative art which, in its most characteristic expression, resembles the fan-shaped leaves of a palm tree. It has an extremely long history, originating in Ancient Egypt with a subsequent development through the art of most of Eurasia, often in forms that bear...
s [as] an unending continuous pattern...in which each leaf grows out of the tip of another." To the adherents of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, the Arabesque are symbolic of their united faith and the way in which traditional Islamic cultures view the world.
There are two modes to arabesque art. The first recalls the principles that govern the order of the world. These principles include the bare basics of what makes objects structurally sound and, by extension, beautiful (i.e. the angle and the fixed/static shapes that it creates—esp. the truss
Truss
In architecture and structural engineering, a truss is a structure comprising one or more triangular units constructed with straight members whose ends are connected at joints referred to as nodes. External forces and reactions to those forces are considered to act only at the nodes and result in...
). In the first mode, each repeating geometric form has a built-in symbolism ascribed to it. For example, the square, with its four equilateral
Equilateral
In geometry, an equilateral polygon is a polygon which has all sides of the same length.For instance, an equilateral triangle is a triangle of equal edge lengths...
sides, is symbolic of the equally important elements of nature: earth
Soil
Soil is a natural body consisting of layers of mineral constituents of variable thicknesses, which differ from the parent materials in their morphological, physical, chemical, and mineralogical characteristics...
, air, fire
Fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition....
and water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...
. Without any one of the four, the physical world, represented by a circle that inscribes the square, would collapse upon itself and cease to exist. The second mode is based upon the flowing nature of plant
Plant
Plants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...
forms. This mode recalls the feminine
Female
Female is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces non-mobile ova .- Defining characteristics :The ova are defined as the larger gametes in a heterogamous reproduction system, while the smaller, usually motile gamete, the spermatozoon, is produced by the male...
nature of life giving. In addition, upon inspection of the many examples of Arabesque art, some would argue that there is in fact a third mode, the mode of Arabic calligraphy.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
is a visible expression of the highest art of all; the art of the spoken word (the transmittal of thoughts and of history). In Islam, the most important document to be transmitted orally is, of course, the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
. Proverb
Proverb
A proverb is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim...
s and complete passages from the Qur'an can be seen today in Arabesque art. The coming together of these three forms creates the Arabesque, and this is a reflection of unity arising from diversity (a basic tenet of Islam).
The arabesque can also be equally thought of as both art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
and science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
, some say. The artwork is at the same time mathematically precise, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolic. So due to this duality of creation, they say, the artistic part of this equation can be further subdivided into both secular and religious artwork. However, for many Muslims there is no distinction; all forms of art, the natural world, mathematics and science are all creations of God and therefore are reflections of the same thing - that is, God's will expressed through His Creation. In other words, man can discover the geometric forms that constitute the Arabesque, but these forms always existed before as part of God's creation, as shown in this picture.
There is great similarity between arabesque artwork from very different geographic regions. In fact, the similarities are so pronounced, that it is sometimes difficult for experts to tell where a given style of arabesque comes from. The reason for this is that the science and mathematics that are used to construct Arabesque artwork are universal. Therefore, for most Muslims, the best artwork that can be created by man for use in the Mosque
Mosque
A mosque is a place of worship for followers of Islam. The word is likely to have entered the English language through French , from Portuguese , from Spanish , and from Berber , ultimately originating in — . The Arabic word masjid literally means a place of prostration...
is artwork that displays the underlying order and unity of nature. The order and unity of the material world, they believe, is a mere ghost
Ghost
In traditional belief and fiction, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a deceased person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. Descriptions of the apparition of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to...
ly approximation of the spirit
Spirit
The English word spirit has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body.The spirit of a living thing usually refers to or explains its consciousness.The notions of a person's "spirit" and "soul" often also overlap,...
ual world, which for many Muslims is the place where the only true reality exists. Discovered geometric forms, therefore, exemplify this perfect reality because God's creation has been obscured by the sin
Sin
In religion, sin is the violation or deviation of an eternal divine law or standard. The term sin may also refer to the state of having committed such a violation. Christians believe the moral code of conduct is decreed by God In religion, sin (also called peccancy) is the violation or deviation...
s of man.
Western arabesque
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, where rabeschi was used in the 16th century as a term for "pilaster
Pilaster
A pilaster is a slightly-projecting column built into or applied to the face of a wall. Most commonly flattened or rectangular in form, pilasters can also take a half-round form or the shape of any type of column, including tortile....
ornaments featuring acanthus
Acanthus (ornament)
The acanthus is one of the most common plant forms to make foliage ornament and decoration.-Architecture:In architecture, an ornament is carved into stone or wood to resemble leaves from the Mediterranean species of the Acanthus genus of plants, which have deeply cut leaves with some similarity to...
decoration, specifically "running scrolls" that ran vertically up a panel or pilaster, rather than horizontally along a frieze
Frieze
thumb|267px|Frieze of the [[Tower of the Winds]], AthensIn architecture the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Even when neither columns nor pilasters are expressed, on an astylar wall it lies upon...
. From there it spread to England, where Henry VIII owned, in an inventory of 1549, an agate
Agate
Agate is a microcrystalline variety of silica, chiefly chalcedony, characterised by its fineness of grain and brightness of color. Although agates may be found in various kinds of rock, they are classically associated with volcanic rocks and can be common in certain metamorphic rocks.-Etymology...
cup with a "fote and Couer of siluer and guilt enbossed with Rebeske worke", and William Herne or Heron, Serjeant Painter
Serjeant Painter
The Serjeant Painter was an honorable and lucrative position with the British monarchy. It carried with it the prerogative of painting and gilding all of the King's residences, coaches, banners, etc. and it grossed over £ 1,000 in a good year by the 18th century...
from 1572 to 1580, was paid for painting Elizabeth I's barge with "rebeske work". Unfortunately the styles so described can only be guessed at, although the design by Hans Holbein
Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein the Younger was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art, satire and Reformation propaganda, and made a significant contribution to the history...
for a covered cup for Jane Seymour
Jane Seymour
Jane Seymour was Queen of England as the third wife of King Henry VIII. She succeeded Anne Boleyn as queen consort following the latter's execution for trumped up charges of high treason, incest and adultery in May 1536. She died of postnatal complications less than two weeks after the birth of...
in 1536 (see gallery) already has zones in both Islamic-derived arabesque/moresque style (see below) and classically-derived acanthus volutes.
Another related term is moresque
Moresque
Moresque is an obsolete alternative term to "Moorish" in English, and in the arts has some specific meanings. By itself the word is used of forms found in ornament and decoration in the applied arts in Europe. Often it is a synonym for arabesque or interlace patterns in the Mannerist and Northern...
, meaning "Moorish
Moors
The description Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of the Maghreb region who are predominately of Berber and Arab descent. They came to conquer and rule the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 800 years. At that time they were Muslim, although earlier the people had followed...
"; Randle Cotgrave
Randle Cotgrave
Randle Cotgrave , may possibly be Randal, son of William Cotgreve of Christleton in Cheshire, who is mentioned in the pedigree of the Cotgreve family, contained in Harl. MS. 1500, fol...
's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611 defines this as: "a rude or anticke painting, or carving, wherin the feet and tayles of beasts, &c, are intermingled with, or made to resemble, a kind of wild leaves, &c." and "arabesque", in its earliest use cited in the OED (but as a French word), as "Rebeske work; a small and curious flourishing". In France "arabesque" first appears in 1546, and "was first applied in the latter part of the 17th century" to grotesque
Grotesque
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
ornament, "despite the classical origin of the latter", especially if without human figures in it - a distinction still often made, but not consistently observed,
Over the following centuries the three terms grotesque, moresque and arabesque were used largely interchangeably in English, French and German for styles of decoration derived at least as much from the European past as the Islamic world, with "grotesque" gradually acquiring its main modern meaning, related more to Gothic gargoyle
Gargoyle
In architecture, a gargoyle is a carved stone grotesque, usually made of granite, with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building thereby preventing rainwater from running down masonry walls and eroding the mortar between...
s and caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
than to either Pompeii
Pompeii
The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning...
-style Roman painting or Islamic patterns. Meanwhile the word "arabesque" was now being applied to Islamic art itself, by 1851 at the latest, when John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
uses it in The Stones of Venice
The Stones of Venice (book)
The Stones of Venice is a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture by English art historian John Ruskin, first published from 1851 to 1853. Intending to prove how the architecture in Venice exemplified the principles he discussed in his earlier work, The Seven Lamps of Architecture,...
. Writers over the last decades have attempted to salvage meaningful distinctions between the words from the confused wreckage of historical sources.
Peter Furhring, a specialist in the history of ornament, says that (also in a French context):
The ornament known as moresque in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (but now more commonly called arabesque) is characterized by bifurcated scrolls composed of branches forming interlaced foliage patterns. These basic motifs gave rise to numerous variants, for example, where the branches, generally of a linear character, were turned into straps or bands. ... It is characteristic of the moresque, which is essentially a surface ornament, that it is impossible to locate the pattern's beginning or end. ... Originating in the Middle East, they were introduced to continental Europe via Italy and Spain ... Italian examples of this ornament, which was often used for bookbindings and embroidery, are known from as early as the late fifteenth century.
Fuhring notes that grotesques were "confusingly called arabesques in eighteenth century France", but in his terminology "the major types of ornament that apear in French sixteenth century etchings and engraving ...can be divided into two groups. The first includes ornaments adopted from antiquity: grotesques, architectural ornaments such as the orders, foliage scrolls and self-contained elements such as trophies, terms and vases. A second group, far smaller than the first, comprises modern ornaments: moresques, interlaced bands, strapwork, and elements such as cartouches...", categories he goes on to discuss individually.
The moresque or arabesque style was especially popular and long-lived in the Western arts of the book: bookbinding
Bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.-Origins of the book:...
s decorated in gold tooling, borders for illustrations, and printer's ornaments for decorating empty spaces on the page. In this field the technique of gold tooling had also arrived in the 15th century from the Islamic world, and indeed much of the leather itself was imported from there. Small motifs in this style have continued to be used by conservative book designers up to the present day.
According to Harold Osborne, in France, the "characteristic development of the French arabesque combined bandwork deriving from the moresque with decorative acanthus foliage radiating from C-scrolls connected by short bars". Apparently starting in embroidery
Embroidery
Embroidery is the art or handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with needle and thread or yarn. Embroidery may also incorporate other materials such as metal strips, pearls, beads, quills, and sequins....
, it then appears in garden design before being used in Northern Mannerist painted decorative schemes "with a central medallion combined with acanthus and other forms" by Simon Vouet
Simon Vouet
Simon Vouet was a French painter and draftsman, who today is perhaps best remembered for helping to introduce the Italian Baroque style of painting to France.-Life:...
and then Charles Lebrun who used "scrolls of flat bandwork joined by horizontal bars and contrasting with ancanthus scrolls and palmette
Palmette
The palmette is a motif in decorative art which, in its most characteristic expression, resembles the fan-shaped leaves of a palm tree. It has an extremely long history, originating in Ancient Egypt with a subsequent development through the art of most of Eurasia, often in forms that bear...
." More exuberant arabesque designs by Jean Bérain the Elder
Jean Bérain the Elder
Jean Berain the Elder was a draughtsman and designer, painter and engraver of ornament, the artistic force in the Royal office of the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi where all the designs originated for court spectacle, from fêtes to funerals, and many designs for furnishings not covered by the Bâtiments du...
are an early "intimation" of the Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
, which was to take the arabesque into three dimensions in reliefs.
The use of "arabesque" as an English noun first appears, in relation to painting, in William Beckford
William Thomas Beckford
William Thomas Beckford , usually known as William Beckford, was an English novelist, a profligate and consummately knowledgeable art collector and patron of works of decorative art, a critic, travel writer and sometime politician, reputed to be the richest commoner in England...
's novel Vathek
Vathek
Vathek is a Gothic novel written by William Beckford...
in 1786.
Arabesque is also used as a term for complex freehand pen flourishes in drawing or other graphic media. The Grove Dictionary of Art
Grove Dictionary of Art
Grove Art Online, formerly The Dictionary of Art but usually known as The Grove Dictionary of Art, is a large encyclopedia of art, now part of the online reference publications of Oxford University Press, and previously a 34-volume printed encyclopedia when last published on paper in 1996...
will have none of this confusion, and says flatly: "Over the centuries the word has been applied to a wide variety of winding and twining vegetal decoration in art and meandering themes in music, but it properly applies only to Islamic art", so contradicting the definition of 1888 still found in the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
: "A species of mural or surface decoration in colour or low relief, composed in flowing lines of branches, leaves, and scroll-work fancifully intertwined. Also fig[uratively]. As used in Moorish and Arabic decorative art (from which, almost exclusively, it was known in the Middle Ages), representations of living creatures were excluded; but in the arabesques of Raphael, founded on the ancient Græco-Roman work of this kind, and in those of Renaissance decoration, human and animal figures, both natural and grotesque, as well as vases, armour, and objects of art, are freely introduced; to this the term is now usually applied, the other being distinguished as Moorish Arabesque, or Moresque."